It’s a question to which the answer keeps changing. Today the situation was clarified, and immediately muddied.

The 13th spot on the grid was freed up when BMW withdrew from the support, and BMW Sauber failed to sign the Concorde Agreement in time. That spot was today awarded to Lotus F1 Team – which was known as Litespeed earlier in the 2010 grid saga. With strong Mayalsian financial backing, it was chosen over BMW Sauber’s bid.

Yet the FIA still likes BMW Sauber – which it was today announced has been purchased by Qadbak Investments – and awarded it the non-existant 14th slot. That means if another team pulls out, they will be in. Fine.

But to confuse matters, the FIA is also going to consult the teams about increasing the grid to 28 cars, to accommodate a 14th team. So now we don’t even know how many cars we’re going to have in 2010.

That raises the issue of whether any of the teams currently signed up for 2010 will pull out. Top of that list is Renault; we should know what’ll happen there when we get the outcome of the FIA’s investigation into Piquet’s crash in Singapore last year.

Then there are the sport’s new entrants.

Virgin’s sponsorship of Manor GP is all but confirmed, so they seem safe. Despite US F1 having the backing of YouTube founder Chad Hurley, there’s still the odd rumbling that all might not be well, though noises coming from the team sound overwhelmingly positive to me.

Campos Meta has been the most open of the three about the difficulties it has faced since the budget cap was dropped, and on the face of it appears to have most work to do with gaining sponsors and investors.

There are more permutations. What if two teams drop out, or the grid is expanded to 28 cars and one team drops out? Is the FIA going to go back to its list of applicants and bring another one in at short notice?

So many questions. Let’s not even think about who’s going to be driving the bloody cars.